End of the Early Middle Ages
The Early Middle Ages lasted from about 476 AD until 1000 AD. It began with the decline of the Classical civilisations, not just in Europe, but in China and India also around somewhat similar dates. It then ended around the year 1000 AD. When considering the broader geographic sweep of history, one should be careful of preconceived ideas associated with the Eurocentric terms like Middle Ages. It is as good a term as any to describe the period between the end of Classical civilisations - the Greco-Roman world, Maurya-Gupta India, and Qin-Han China - and the beginning of the age of truly world history around the year 1455; historians often prefer the term Post-Classical Era. While for Europe, the Early Middle Ages especially were an era of economic and cultural collapse where even the greatest kings were hardly more than warlords, the course of history worked differently in other parts of the world. Althoughr Muslim civilisation and to a lessor extent Byzantine civilisation were undoubtedly impressive, the greatest empire on earth during this time was probably Imperial China. China's classical period under the Han Dynasty ended around 220 AD, and was followed after an unsettled period by a spectacular Golden Age ''under first the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and then the Song Dynasties (960-1279). China was the richest as well as the most populous empire on earth. Her genuine China-wide market-economy was so rich, that the Song issued the world's first paper money, in part because coinage could not be minted fast enough. Giant Chinese junks equipped with the sternpost rudder, multiple masts, square-rigged sails, and compasses ploughed the India Ocean Trade route throughout the China Seas and Indian Ocean. Her dynamism at this time is demonstrated by many of the most significant innovations in history: the compass, paper making, paper money, manual movable type printing, and gunpowder. Largely through stimulation from China, Japan also emerged as a rich and unique civilisation. The luxury and delight of Kyoto at this time has been impressed on the Western imagination by two of the greatest works of Japanese literature, ''The Tale of Genji and the better known The Pillow Book. Meanwhile on the Indian subcontinent, the collapse of the classic Gupta Empire in around 550 AD, was followed by centuries of fragmentation, with many Hindu kingdoms constantly competing for power. Nevertheless, she could still produce such sublime monumental architecture as the temples of Thanjavur, and Indian mathematics of the era was highly influential in the Muslim world and later Europe. In the year 1000, there were few signs of the astonishing success that European civllisation would enjoy in the second millennium. Paris and London were disease ridden firetraps with barely 25,000 people, that could not approached in magnificence Constantinople, Córdoba, Baghdad, Kaifeng, Hangzhou, or Kyoto. Nevertheless, as it turned out, the Vikings and the Hungarians were the last of the wave of invasions that Europe would endure. In contrast, India would come under successive disruptions by Muslim invaders from the 11th-century, and China would succumb in the 13th-century to the rule of a Mongol dynasty, the Yuan. These more settled conditions in Europe would allow a tremendous period of growth during the High Middle Age (1000-1337); an expansion of population, urbanisation, and the economy, as well as artistic, political, and intellectual creativity. History China during the Early Middle Ages The classical chapter of Chinese history ended with the collapse of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), the first of the five great Chinese dynasties. This was followed by three-and-a-half centuries of chaos known as the Period of Disunity. During this era, a strong division developed between northern and southern China. While the south was isolated by distance from the barbarian lands, the north was riven by warfare and often came under the control of foreign rulers. In this, there was observable for the first time China’s striking powers of cultural digestion; gradually barbarians lost their own identity and became only another kind of Chinese. The man who finally succeeded in reuniting China, the Emperor Wendi of Sui (581–604), was a member of a powerful aristocratic Han Chinese family who had taken service under a succession of non-Chinese houses in the northwest. He served with apparent distinction under the Northern Zhou, who by 577 had succeeded in defeating their rivals, and taking-over all of northern China. Usurping the throne of an apparently deranged young emperor in 581, Wendi sowed division among the nomadic tribes to secured his northern frontier, and then overwhelmed southern China by 589. While short-lived, the Sui Dynasty (581-604) was a pivotal period in Chinese history. The Sui pioneered the highly efficient bureaucracy that would reach its fruition during later dynasties: Wendi streamlined the operation of government by rationalising it into six departments headed by ministers; imposed stricter use of examinations for entry into the imperial bureaucracy; made sweeping reform to local government, most notably a system of land redistribution, intended to reduce inequality and improve agricultural productivity; and standardised the coinage across the realm. The late reign of Wendi was a period of prosperity with vast agricultural surpluses that supported rapid population growth. His son undertook on an even more ambitious project; the Grand Canal linking the Yellow River and Yangtze River. While the pressing aim was for shipping rice to the capital, the reliable inland waterway facilitated cultural exchange between north and south helping to consolidate the newly unified state, and would become a bustling domestic trade thoroughfare for centuries. The canal was nevertheless an immense undertaking that employed masses of forced labour, working under appalling conditions. This was combined with a massive invasions of the Korean Peninsula that failed disastrously, to trigger widespread revolts that led to the fall of the dynasty. One of the Sui generals, the Emperor Gaozu of Tang, emerged as the de-facto leader of the rebels, and seized power for himself, as the founder of the new Tang Dynasty (618-907). Under the Tang, China entered her most dynamic era; a Golden Age of cosmopolitan civilisation still today looked back upon nostalgically. The Tang maintained and improved upon the bureaucracy initiated by the Sui, that made possible such wonders as: the Tang Law C0de (624) which became the basis for later codes not only in China but throughout the whole East Asia region; and the famous map of 801, a landmark in cartography, charting the entire Tang Empire in great detail and measuring 9 by 10 meters. By the reign of Taizong of Tang (626-649), China covered most of the territories previously held by the Han Dynasty, including parts of Vietnam in the south, parts of Manchuria in the northeast, and as far west as eastern Kazakhstan. It reached its greatest extent under one of the few female emperors, Wu Zetian (690–705), spreading well north of the Great Wall, and as far away as Bukhara and Samarkand (modern day Uzbekistan) princes recognised her sovereignty; a population of at least 50-million people. China also exerted a powerful cultural influence over its neighbours, especially Japan and Korea. Trade flourished within the empire, as well as along the Silk Road, with the Byzantine Empire becoming a prime buyer of Chinese silk. The Tang capital of Cháng’ān was the most impressive capital in the world, with a population of perhaps one-million, and its own foreign quarter, where merchants from as far away as Europe could be seen mingling with the locals. Stimulated by contact with India and the Middle East, Tang China also saw a flowering of a Golden Age of Chinese culture. Buddhism, adopted by the imperial family, continued to flourish, becoming thoroughly sinicized with the traditional stupa evolving into a specifically Chinese form, that of the pagoda. Potters discovered the technique of the thin white translucent ware known as porcelain; still known today as "fine china" in some English-speaking countries. In the early 18th-century, Europeans would go to great lengths to learn the manufacturing secrets. The poetry of the Tang is still regarded as some of China’s finest. The three greatest Tang poets were contemporaries in the early 8th century, Wang Wei (d. 759), Li Po (d. 762) and Tu Fu (d. 770). Chinese poetry was a social activity, with friends writing stanzas for each other at a party or picnic as a competitive game. The oldest known hand-printed book dates also from towards the end of the Tang Dynasty, the Wang Chieh Scroll (868); the high standard of the printing suggests it must have had many predecessors. However, by the mid-8th-century, an new expansionist power was firmly in control of Central Asia, the Arab Muslims. A shattering defeat for the Chinese at the Battle of Talas (751) marked the end of westward expansion for the Tang, and drastically weakened the central imperial government; for the Arabs, an interesting fringe benefit of victory was that captured Chinese soldiers revealed secrets of Chinese paper-making. Seven years later the Arabs would again demonstrate their strength, impertinently travelling the Silk Road to sack and plunder Canton, on the southern Chinese coast. Between the two Arab incursions, the Tang imperial government was gravely weakened by the rebellion of an army commander serving on the northwest frontier; the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763). Minorities from the frontiers were often appointed as generals, in the belief that they were so far removed from the political system that ideas of a coup would not enter their minds. Nevertheless, An Lushan, a general of Sogdian-Turkic descent, took advantage of his command to make a bid for imperial power. The revolt was eventually put-down only through ceding huge amounts of military and tax-collecting power to provincial governors, permanently weakening central government control. The next century and a half was characterised by a series of often violent struggles between the imperial palace and regional leaders. Furthermore, the Tang drew back from its former openness, turning more strongly to Confucianism, and with the withdrawal of imperial favour Buddhists clashed with indigenous Daoists; Buddhism was even briefly persecuted by the state and never regained the power and prestige in China that it had enjoyed up until that time. Soon lawless provincial armies and popular peasant unrest combined to make the country ungovernable. When the last Tang Emperor was usurped and killed in 903 AD, the country broke apart into another chaotic fifty years of regional warlords. The years between 903 and 960 are known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. Five regimes rapidly succeeded one another in control of the northern Imperial heartland, while smaller realms coexisted in the south and west. Eventually in 960, one warlord, the Emperor Taizu, established a sixth regime in the northern heartland on a more firm footing, as the Song Dynasty (960-1279). By 979, the Song had conquered and reunified most of China proper, although large swaths of the outer territories within the Great Wall were occupied by sinicized nomadic rulers such as the Liao and Western Xia. Thus Song China was a smaller empire than under the Tang, and also militarily weaker, compelled to pay their northern neighbours annual tribute to keep them at bay. Her territory was reduced even further, when the Jurchen, an aggressive group from the northern steppes, overwhelmed the Liao in 1125. Two years later, they captured the Song capital, Kaifeng, and carried off the emperor and 3000 of his court. Nevertheless, a prince of the imperial family established a new capital at the other end of the Grand Canal, at Hangzhou. Here the Southern Song continue for another 150 years, in territory reduced to a mere fraction of the Tang. Despite its weakness, the Golden Age that had been begun under the Tang continued, and was in many way surpassed. To assert control over their empire, the Song reduced the power of the regional military commanders, by giving greater authority to the civilian bureaucracy. As a result, this is the heyday of the Confucians. Ever since the Sui Dynasty, scholar officials had supposedly been selected on merit through the civil service examinations, but nepotism and corruption often frustrated this intention. In the Song period, it became virtually the only means of entry and promotion, in part to undermine the military-aristocratic elite. The economy and population boomed, and there more clearly emerged a genuine China-wide market-economy; the most advanced economy in the medieval world. Farming became much more efficient, and farmers increasingly focused on cash crops. Private and government-controlled industries as well as handicraft products became much more central to the Chinese economy. 11th-century China was producing as much iron as Europe would be able to produce in the 17th-century. The Chinese economy was so rich, that the Song issued the world's first paper money, in part because coinage could not be minted fast enough. Cities became more densely populated with a rich urban culture; the Song capital of Kaifeng, as well as Soozhou, Hangzhou and Canton all had populations of more than a million. The literature and the visual artsl flourished, fuelled by a rising demand from an ever-increasing wealthy middle class. With the Silk Road to the far west blocked by nomadic empires, maritime trade using the India Ocean Trade route became increasingly important, as well as the first Chinese permanent standing navy to protect it. Giant Chinese junks equipped with the sternpost rudder, multiple masts, square-rigged sails, and compasses travelled throughout the China Seas and Indian Ocean; merchants even had insurance to hedge the risk of maritime trade. While the Tang printed the earliest books, the Song printed them in huge numbers, especially the Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist classics. They experimented with manual movable type printing, but the Chinese script posed significant challenges, and it wasn’t until the early 13th-century that the Koreans finally fully achieved it. The Song were also the first to apply a revolutionary new technology to the battlefield, gunpowder, the formulas for which had been known to Chinese alchemists since the 2nd-century. Weapons included primitive flamethrowers, grenades, land mines, cannons, and firearms. Nevertheless they would prove powerless in the face of a new predatory enemy; Kublai Khan of the Mongols. Japan until the Early Middle Ages The people who we today call the Japanese effectively invaded from the mainland from the 4th-century BC, probably through the Korean peninsula, bringing with them iron technology and advanced farming techniques. They occupied the southern and central islands, where laid the best agricultural prospects, and the original natives were forced ever further north; today only the indigenous Ainu people of northern Japan descend from them. Before Japan emerged in her own written historical records in the 5th century AD, according to the Chinese sources the country was divided up among hundreds of clans, and by the mid-3rd century AD the clan occupying the Yamato plain, south of Osaka, had established an ill-defined supremacy over the others as overlord, or even emperor. The most famous of these early emperors was the semi-legendary shaman-queen Queen Himiko (d. 248), for the leaders of any clan, and above all the imperial dynasty, had more than a secular role. They had an important function in Japan's traditional religion, Shinto; a version of the shamanism with a profusion of local and personal gods and spirits. To legitimatise the ascendancy of the Yamato, a creation myth was commissioned claiming their descent from Japan’s supreme deity, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. "Once upon a time, two deities Izanagi and tIzanami came down to a watery world in order to create land. Droplets from Izanagi’s jewelled spear solidified into the land now known as Japan. Izanami and Izanagi then populated the new land with gods, chief among them Amaterasu. The gods proliferated and had many dramatic adventures, establishing such basic patterns of life as day and night, summer and winter. Eventually the Sun Goddess sent her grandson to rule Japan, and his great-grandson Jimmu-Tenno is listed in Japanese legend as the first emperor, reputedly in 660 BC." The founding myth had the desired effect, and despite a number of perilous moments, Japan continues to have the longest unbroken hereditary monarchic line in the world. The Yamato period is also notable for the construction of distinctive keyhole-shaped burial mounds, surrounded by a great triple moat. It was also during the Yamato period that Japan established an international diplomatic presence, and began to be influenced by the highest example of civilization of which the Japanese were aware, that of imperial China. Through consciously emulating China, Japan hoped to be recognised as a civilised country. One of the major themes of Japanese history is her complex and often changing relationship with China. Chinese writing was brought to Japan, perhaps in the 4th-century, and its characters adapted to provide a written form of the native language. Buddhism was introduction sometime in the 6th-century, according to tradition in 552; although Buddhism originated in India, it was seen by the Japanese as a Chinese religion. By 587, the powerful Soga clan became the first of many families to dominate the government, relegating the emperors to a ritualistic and spiritual role. Under Prince Shotoku, de facto leader of Japan from 594 to 622, there was an attempt to introduce Chinese Confucian pattern of government, based on merit, in place of the more warlike rivalries of Japanese clan society. He authored a proto-constitution called the 17 Articles ''with a very Confucian flavour, rooting out corruption and esteeming virtues that were to be expected of government officials. Promotion, however, did tend to be more by hereditary rank than merit, a Japanese preference against which the Chinese tradition of examinations could make little headway. The downfall of the Soga clan came in 645 with the assassination of two leading members, in a coup orchestrated by the imperial family in alliance with the founder of the Fujiwara clan. Major reforms followed, that continued the trend towards absolute rule by the centralised bureaucracy of the imperial court. All land in Japan was nationalised at least in theory to be distributed equally to every citizen. A new and equitable tax system was created, based on a census of all households. Laws were codified for the first time. Construction of a new nationwide network of roads was started. Envoys and students were dispatched to China to learn seemingly everything. Japan's creation myth was also formalised in the ''Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720), with the aim of legitimising the imperial dynasty through claimed divine descent. Until the early 8th-century, the Japanese court had moved from town to town, but the increasing weight of imperial bureaucracy now suggested the need for a permanent capital. It was first built at Nara in 710, but Emperor Kammu (r 781–806) decided to relocate the capital in 794 to Kyoto; it remained Japan’s capital for more than a thousand years, though not necessarily as the centre of actual power. His reasons are unclear, but may have been related to an inauspicious series of widespread droughts and famines. Both cities were closely modelled on the Tang capital at Chang'an, and built to a Chinese grid pattern; the fashion for all things Chinese was now at its peak. So was the influence of Buddhism. The Tōdai-ji temple at Nara houses the largest bronze statue of the Buddha in the world. It was in Kyoto that the Fujiwara clan reached the pinnacle of its power, dominating the imperial court to an even greater extend than the Soga. This influence was cultivated and maintained through intermarriage. For two centuries, the Fujiwara had reserved for their family the right to provide brides for the imperial house. By tradition, the son of such a marriage would be raised with the mother's family, and with skilful manipulation youthful emperors were dominated by Fujiwara mothers or wives. They were then allowed to retire early to a life of ease in a Buddhist monastery; since their imperial duties mainly consisted of wearisome ritual, most were happy to do so. In 877, the Fujiwara created for themselves the new office of Kampaku or chancellor, with the emperors reduced to little more than a figureheads. The success of the Fujiwara clan in maintaining this system depends partly on the sophistication and elegance of the court life, which enticed nobles into the role of courtiers; reminiscent of the court of Louis XIV. During this period Kyoto had a population of perhaps 100,000, making it much larger than most European cities at the time. The refined artistic pursuits and etiquette of high society in the capital was brilliantly depicted in two of the greatest works of Japanese literature, The Tale of Genji ''and the better known The Pillow Book,'' both written by court-ladies. It showed a world where courtiers indulged in amusements, such as guessing flowers by their scent, building extravagant follies, and sparing no expense to indulge in the latest luxury. On the positive side, the arts flourished, especially poetry, literature, paintings, and calligraphy. A more wholly Japanese style emerged, especially in painting with the Yamato-e style characterised by more angular lines, the use of brighter colours and greater decorative details. On the negative side however, court life was a world increasingly estranged from the real one. Out in the provinces, new power-brokers were emerging. The rugged landscape and isolated valleys of Japan where local loyalties were strong, always worked against centralised rule. The land reforms of the 7th-century had been slowly whittled away by noblemen with influence at court, who were granted large manor estates as payment for carrying out their duties. With the minor provincial nobility in charge of these estates increasingly left to their own devices by these absentee landlords in Kyoto, they found themselves in the position to create solid bases for local power, with their own private armies of Samurai. The imperial bureaucracy, firmly reserved to the aristocracy unlike the Chinese, could do nothing to oppose the interests of the noble families. With peasant revolts from the 10th-century and the still unsubdued Ainu peoples, gradually these local chieftains allied themselves with one or other of two great military clans, the Taira and the Minamoto. Both of these were descended from distant imperial family members barred from the succession; a practice known as "dynastic shedding". Thus they were not only hostile to each other, but to the imperial court itself. By the mid-12th century, Japan descended into a full-scale civil-war, from which the Minamoto Shoguns would ascend to rulers of a new militaristic Japan. India during the Early Middle Ages The classical period of Indian history ended with the collapse of the Gupta Empire in around 550 AD. For several unsettled centuries afterward, India fragmented into many Hindu kingdoms constantly competing for power, but none able to consistently control lands much beyond their core region for long periods. The historian John Keay puts the typical number of dynasties within the subcontinent at any one time at between 20 and 40, not including very local rajas. There were nevertheless several dynasties that did rule large areas. In southern India, the most extensive was the Tamil kingdom of the Cholas, who were a notable power between 850 and 1215, and then lingered on for another two centuries. Through their naval strength, they established the greatest empire the region had seen, reaching at its peak from the Godavari River to the southern tip of Sri Lanka. While very much focused on far-reaching maritime trade, the Cholas also left behind some fine examples of monumental architecture, such as the sublime temples of Thanjavur and Gangaikondacholapuram. In northern India, during the late-8th and 9th centuries, three dynasties contested for control in a conflict known as the Tripartite Struggle: the Gurjara-Pratihara Empire (786-910) in the northwest, the Pala Empire (770-1023) in the northeast, and the Rashtrakuta Empire (753–982) in central India. The Pala are notable as the last major Buddhist power on the subcontinent. The Gurjara-Pratiharas were instrumental in containing a new invading forces, the Muslims. The explosive first century of Arab Muslim conquest had brought their armies to mouth of the Indus River (modern-day Pakistan) by 712. But this region, separated by desert from the rest of the subcontinent, was a poor stepping stone for further conquest. Three centuries would pass before the disunited Hindu kingdoms of north India faced the real thrust of Islam. The Gurjara-Pratiharas defeated many attacks of the Muslims from the west, but with their decline from the early-10th century India would lack the unity to resist them. The former Gurjara-Pratihara capital of Kannauj would be sacked in 1018 by the first Muslim power to established a firm foothold on the subcontinent, the Ghazni Sultanate. There did emerge in the 10th century one Hindu power in northwest India that the Muslims would find it almost impossible to suppress, a clan calling themselves Rajput. Centred in Rajasthan, they saw themselves as the descendants of the warrior caste of ancient India, and had passionate belief in warfare, deeds of honour, and a code of chivalrous conduct. When the Rajput weren't fighting each other, they caused chaos in northern India, and made the eventual Muslim incursions relatively easy. Nevertheless they would hold out against the Muslims for several centuries, either through fighting or withdrawing to their formidable desert fortresses. Category:Historical Periods